Forming the hero in four modernist novels (E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene)

My interest in this work is to explore the presentation and representation of the hero in four novels written in England in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The resonance of the hero in a particular collection of British fiction at the opening of the century implies that he, the hero, is both necessary and irrelevant, and effective and anachronistic to the imagination and psyche of the English subject, society and nation. What is more, the novels show that the image and dramatisation of the hero undergoes figurative and conceptual changes within a literary and political framework. The hero travels both actively and passively through the idea and task of the modern novel from the premonitions of the First World War towards a post-war Britain that reveals its national, cultural and religious insecurity and weary politics of individual and national industrialism. The novels, Under Western Eyes (1911), by Joseph Conrad, Sons and Lovers (1913), by D. H. Lawrence, Maurice (1914, 1971), by E. M. Forster, and The Man Within (1929), by Graham Greene, seem to shape and improvise what have become staple techniques and visions of modernist literature: the indication and manipulation of fragmented language and identity, and the irreconcilable awareness of isolation from and belonging to a larger world of action. In view of these novels, and the particular role and manifestation of the hero as an idea and an individual in a living world, the reality of the hero is one of inevitable action, even when agency arises from a most reluctant source.